It happens late in Season 4, right around the time that Iowa is inexplicably identified as "mountainous terrain." (A few minutes after a point at "115 degrees west" had been grossly misplaced into Iowa.)
But the geographic ignorance isn't the problem, just the symptom of a problem that manifests itself from midnight onward.
(lots of spoilers follow, but only through Season 4)
The first 16 hours of 24, Season 4 -- and the first 88 hours of the series itself -- are magnificent television. Even the big plot twist at 11 p.m. (the shooting down of Air Force One, which I believe Bill Simmons of all people spoiled for me) leaves open all sorts of possibilities.
The 11 p.m. to Midnight episode focuses entirely on recovering the nuclear football, and nicely accomplishes two things: drama in and of itself, along with exposition.
Then two things in particular happen:
1. The writers abruptly stop being even-handed, particularly about torture. I don't think any sane person could accuse the first 88 hours of the series of political hackery. All previous scenes of torture, or potential torture, had been morally ambiguous at best. In Season 2 we see a president about to rely on faulty intelligence to start an unwise war(!), and even a few hours earlier in Season 4 we see corrupt defense contractors. Even immediately before Air Force One goes down we see the catastrophic consequences of intelligence people doing their job badly, i.e. failing to observe procedures and letting a big lead fall through the cracks until it's too late. But the last few hours of Season 4 are agitprop: They support a position I agree with, but very ham-handedly.
2. As a plot device to bring back a super-popular character (and also support the aforementioned ham-handedness), they make vice president Logan out to be a complete pansy. Now, 24 asks people to believe a lot of far-fetched things (of which my favorite is that Jack Bauer would find it a uniquely good idea to knock over a gas station (and take hostages!) as pretext for stalling a suspect). I love David Palmer as much as anyone (Julia loves him even more) but this I just can't buy.
In any case, some of my left-minded acquaintances have scoffed at 24 and made allusions that had previously made no sense whatsoever to me -- until I realized that the plot and even the tone they had in mind where what we start to see at the end of Season 4.
Bonus points for "can you torture a guy who might know where a nuke is about to go off in an hour?" AND the hoary old rail-switch problem into the same episode. (OK, not literally one man versus five on train tracks, but instead one sure death versus millions in peril, in that "Jack points a gun at a surgeon's head" scene just before 3 a.m.)
Posted by Matt Bruce at December 25, 2007 01:42 PM